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Sunday, January 11, 2009

Reader's Diary #434- The Good News Bible: Chronicles 1

When someone says they've read the whole Bible, what does that mean? Does skimming count? If not, I'm afraid I'll never be added to the list of people able to make that claim.

How do people manage to get through passage after passage of "Adam was the father of Seth, Seth was the father of Enosh, Enosh the father of Kenan. Kenan the father of Mahalalel, Mahalalel the father of Jared. Jared was the father of Waldo, who was the father of Methuselah; Methuselah was the father of Lamech..."? (The KJV keeps it interesting by throwing begats around.)

My strategy to work through it was to look for names that still exist today. I've met a Caleb, an Abraham, and even a Mannaseh, but I've yet to encounter a Ziph, a Penuel, or an Ishbah.

Things get a little interesting towards the middle when the lineage stuff dies down and Satan convinces David to take a census (because you know how evil those things are), and later when David's son Solomon is able to fulfill his father's dream of building a temple for the Lord.

Still, there's so much hard slogging at the beginning of Chronicles 1, a few more miracles at the end would have been nice.

3 comments:

...well, evil in that context. The point being that David had previously relied on God rather than on the strength of his own army (which had worked pretty well for him, you have to admit). The census wasn't a particularly evil thing in itself but was bad in this circumstance because David used it as a means to trust in his own (army's) strength rather than in God.